Favorite made-in-Seattle movies

News that a movie starring Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart was shooting in Seattle yesterday got me thinking about other films that have been made here. The Mayor’s Office of Film and Music has a mostly complete list here.

The list goes back a ways.

The first Hollywood film shot here was “Tugboat Annie” (1933), a comedy starring Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery (it was MGM’s most profitable film that year). John Wayne tried to re-invent himself in the “Dirty Harry” mold with “McQ” (1974), a police procedural which is interesting for its view of a grittier downtown Seattle than what we enjoy now (and embarrassing for John Wayne trying to act 20 years younger than he was).

The most famous (and one of the few with “Seattle” in the title) was, of course, “Sleepless in Seattle.” Even the meeting at the observation deck of the Empire State Building in that film was shot in Seattle (in an unused hanger at Magnusson Park). And who can forget Tom Hanks rowing away from his houseboat on Lake Union … and in the next shot pulling ashore at Alki? Ah, Hollywood, collapser of time and space!

‘The Parallax View’

My favorite: “The Parallax View” (1974). Directed by Alan J. Pakula, it’s the ultimate political conspiracy thriller, with Warren Beatty as a Seattle newspaper reporter on the trail of a murder-for-hire corporation.

The opening set piece is a political assassination on the observation deck of the Space Needle that is both shocking and scary and wonderfully inconclusive. The chase scene with the assassin (or is he?) across the roof of the Needle still gives me the willies (note to bad guys: There are stairs that go down from the top. That’s the best way to flee, not onto the roof). The film is a dark meditation on the political climate of the 1960s and it ends not in triumph but despair.

If you see it, catch it in a widescreen version to better savor Gordon Willis’ moody cinematography.

OK, now it’s your turn: What are you favorite made-in-Seattle movies? Did you see any of them actually being filmed? Any favorite movie-star encounters here? Discuss!

Update: Thanks, commenter jope, Monica did have a post last fall on this very subject. She listed the P-I staff’s favorites made-in-Seattle movies. Check out that list here.